In this week’s edition of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I get you caught up with the news you need to know. We discuss the changes in Jetpack 3.2, WordSesh 3, and a recent security vulnerability in WP eCommerce. We also discuss whether or not WordPress is a verb. Stories Discussed: Jetpack 3.2 Released, Introduces…
Many WordPress developers have adopted Vagrant as part of their toolbox for creating development environments, due to the fact that it’s relatively lightweight and makes collaborative work much easier. Varying Vagrant Vagrants is one of the most popular Vagrant configurations for WordPress, but there are many others out there tailored to different uses, i.e. Chassis,…
Matt Mullenweg announced today at Web Summit in Dublin that Automattic has acquired Code for the People, a UK-based WordPress development agency and longtime WordPress.com VIP partner. The acquisition adds all six members of the company, including co-founders Simon Dickson and Simon Wheatley, to the WordPress.com VIP team. “It’s a fairly natural transition for us,”…
One of the most difficult parts of running a WordPress business is coming up with a revenue strategy. In a post on the official SIDEKICK blog, Ben Fox explains that in the past two weeks, customers went through a pricing experiment with an opportunity to provide feedback. The feedback to SIDEKICK highlighted areas ripe for…
Taylor Lovett, director of Web Engineering at 10up, announced today that the company is open sourcing its engineering best practices. 10up has historically been a leader in contributing to open platforms, most notably being one of the first development agencies to sponsor an employee to work full-time on WordPress core. The company used GitHub pages…
Joseph Herbrandson of Sucuri published an excellent article listing the most common attacks today’s websites are facing. Herbrandson does a good job of explaining the attacks without inundating the reader with technical jargon. He also links to WordPress items that are relevant to each type of attack. I’ve spoken to Herbrandson at a few different…
Entry level WordPress debugging often involves the tedious task of turning plugins on and off to track down the culprit that is breaking something on your site. When seeking help in support forums, users are often instructed to deactivate all of their plugins and activate one of the default themes. This process can become especially…
Choosing a webhost is an important but difficult decision, especially when a lot of reviews contain questionable content with affiliate links. It’s hard to find non-biased information such as real experiences customers have had with a company. One reliable source of information is the WPShout webhosting survey. Despite a goal of 500, only 159 people…
WordPress 4.1 will be adding several major improvements for theme developers. Joost de Valk opened a ticket three years ago, requesting a better option for controlling the output of title tags. He proposed a patch that would output the title tag during the run of wp_head, based on whether the current theme has added theme_support.…
The third annual WordSesh will take place on December 20th, 2014 at UTC+0. Organized by Scott Basgaard, WordSesh is like a virtual WordCamp except there is one session per hour for 24 hours. Unlike WordSesh 2, this year’s event will have one track instead of two. As in previous years, it will be free to…
WordPress 4.0 brought plugin icons and info cards to the installer, offering developers more incentive to brand their extensions for a better appearance in the admin. Plugin branding has made exploring the 34,000+ items in the official Plugin Directory a more friendly and colorful experience for users. Building on top of the new plugin identity…
One of the feature plugins under development for possible inclusion to WordPress 4.1 is called Focus. Focus enhances the Distraction Free Writing mode in WordPress. Janneke Van Dorpe is the lead developer for the project with Mark Jaquith and Andrew Ozz contributing as well. Unlike DFW mode in WordPress 4.0, Focus keeps the meta boxes,…
Jetpack 3.2 was released last week, featuring a new site logo feature for theme authors, bug fixes, and performance improvements. Today the Jetpack team officially announced the release, along with a new feature that wasn’t mentioned in the changelog. Centralized Posting from WordPress.com Self-hosted WordPress sites connected via Jetpack can now publish posts using the…
WordPress for Android 3.3 was released last week. A majority of the improvements found in this release center around enhancing WordPress.com’s built-in Reader. Android users will find a few changes in the app but nothing that would effect the normal publishing workflow: The post and the comment views are now split up in the Reader.…
Desk is a new $29 desktop publishing application for Mac OS X, developed by John Saddington, aimed at simplifying the publishing experience. Similar to WordPress’ distraction free writing mode, the interface disappears while in full screen mode. When you move the mouse cursor, interface elements appear on the right and lower part of the screen. At the…